What Makes a Visionary?

Two things that help for sure: To talk a lot and to be heard by many. While many people are able to take the first hurdle, the second one is not so easy. Visionaries are heard, obviously, but that is a kind of circular reference; or, what comes first – the visionary or the article about her?

Two more ingredients to visionarydom: Luck and an eccentric, self assured character. It helps founding a billion-dollar business with some other kind of genius; and sometimes shouting at people, telling them their work is worthless crap. One last thing: On the way becoming a visionary it wouldn't hurt to have some relevant and interesting visions, actually. Additionally to make one's million-dollar-business into a billion-dollar-business. So far all attributes can be applied to, for example, William Gates III, but he has not so much been accorded a visionary but for the vision that everybody should buy a copy of Windows.
Steve Jobs had visions about the future of technology and he was often bold in making them reality. And he started a big business with some luck, had a eccentric character, and liked to talk, without being a chattering celebrity; that brought him on many magazine covers, compared to other visionaries, like, for example, Alan Kay.

Once you've been accorded as a visionary, and you still like to think about the future a lot, and talk about your thoughts, chances are that some of your visions come true and you are so much more a visionary. Other things said, they get a-forgotten, luckily.

A tiny little detail I found in a Steve Jobs interview of 1990: He talks about collaboration and how great modern computers (like his NeXT workstations) support that. When asked about the future of the different devices in people's homes he says:

Ten years later Steve Jobs made Apple build a phone that can be a radio, and a kind of television set as well. Borders between different classes are more and more diffuse, a lot of it with the help of Jobs' Apple.